Attorney: Decades-old nuclear sludge poses community health risk

JILL BARTONAssociated Press Writer

Published Thursday, August 11, 2005

click photo to enlarge

This photo supplied by Fort Pierce Tribune, shows the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant on the Indian River in Vero Beach, Fla. in October, 2002. Thousands of gallons of radioactive sludge that was shipped daily from the St. Lucie nuclear plant to unknown locations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating a cancer risk for the community, said an attorney for residents who are suing the plant operator. (AP Photo/Juan Dale Brown, The Fort Pierce Tribune )

WEST PALM BEACH -- Thousands of gallons of radioactive sludge was shipped daily from the St. Lucie nuclear plant to undocumented locations in the late 1970s, creating a cancer risk for the community, according to an attorney who's suing the plant operator.

Attorney Nancy La Vista said she can prove that errors in handling nuclear waste by Florida Power & Light caused the brain cancer of at least two children.

She represents the parents of 11-year-old Zachary Finestone, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in March 2000, and Ashton Lowe, who had brain cancer when he died at age 13 in May 2001. The trials in the civil lawsuits could begin early next year.

State health officials previously reviewed a potential cluster of childhood cancers in St. Lucie County, where both boys had lived, after discovering 29 cases of brain and central nervous system cancer from 1981 to 1997.

Health Department officials tested soil, air and water for 500 chemicals at the homes of the affected children and their pregnant mothers, but they found no pattern.

But La Vista points to other tests that showed unusually high levels of radioactive strontium in the boys' baby teeth, and blames Florida Power & Light releases from 1977 to 1982.

FPL said it mistakenly shipped radioactive wastes to farmland about 10 miles west of the St. Lucie nuclear plant on two occasions. Those incidents were reported when FPL discovered the problem in 1982, a decade before the boys were born, said FPL spokeswoman Rachel Scott.

The utility immediately cleaned up the site at Glades Cutoff Road, removing six inches of soil from a contaminated 20-foot by 30-foot area. The radioactive material was shipped to a nuclear waste depository in Barnwell, S.C, according to court documents.

Scott said tests by state and federal authorities show no health threat at the site or in the surrounding air, soil or water.

"It's a very sad situation when families are dealing with cancer, but there's absolutely no validity to the claim that it has anything to do with the plant," Scott said.

The farmland is in the northwest corner of St. Lucie County, about 125 miles north of Miami and a few miles north of Port St. Lucie, which in recent years has become one of the fastest growing cities in the nation.

La Vista said the problems at the farm can be traced back to 1977 and were discovered in 1982 when workers learned of a plumbing mix up.

Workers believed a sink at the plant drained to a tank designated for radioactive waste and used it to clean highly radioactive items. But it instead went into the nuclear plant's sewage disposal system.

The potentially radioactive sewage went into a septic tank, where it was pumped out at least daily and taken to the Fort Pierce Sewage Treatment from 1977 to 1980, according to documents.

The misunderstanding was attributed to "essentially 100 percent turnover" in staff, according to documents obtained in the lawsuit.

La Vista said no records exist detailing the handling or monitoring of the nuclear waste hauled to the municipal facility. She says the frequent shipments likely sent radioactive material into the air, water and ground.

But Scott said that tests conducted after 1980 would have revealed contamination that had built up in previous years and showed no health risks.

"There would have been no radioactive material in the liquid itself," she said. "If there had been any problems whatsoever at any time during the operation of the plant, it would have been detected by the Florida Department of Health Bureau of Radiation Control."

La Vista said she expects to prove to a jury that FPL exceeded the allowable releases of nuclear waste and contaminated parts of St. Lucie County.

"We believe the cancer cluster is partially related to the nuclear waste. Our cancer experts say these children were exposed to radiation," she said. "The community needs to be concerned."